The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-06-25
BY COL. F. DOMAIN.

In thousands of American homes to- day, the one all-pervading question is: "Where shall we go for the summer! Shall we hie to the seashore, the mountains or the lakesides? Shall we spend the sultry season tloundering in the surf,among half-or- three quarters nude he and she vulgarians at Cape May or Narragansett? Shall we squander a fortune in dresses and jewels and join the gaudy mob of mill
 liners and dressmakers' signs and tailors' dummies at Saratoga? Shall we don tow linen and corduroy, and play the role of semi barbarians in the rude fishing and hunting resorts of the mountains and lakes? Shall we rush off to Europe to loaf around fashiona- ble hotels, wine-shops and haber
 dashers' Establishments, all inf nitely inferior to our own; and then come back to prate, in mock-tur- tie French, of "la belle Paree," queenly 1Nad,'eed," Como, Mont Blanc, Rome, Venice, Vesuvius, the Alps and hun dred other places we never saw and things we know nothing about? Or shall we nail up the front doors and windows; instruct the servant at the basement entrance to say, "Gone abroad" and live on crackers and sar- dimes in the third-story back-rooms?
 A few years ago, summer tours and vacations were the luxuries of the rich or the well-ofr alone. Now, every
 body who is anybody goes; and, un- fortunately, too many of our people do their travelling abroad before they have ever seen their own country. In single day recently 480 first cabin passengers sailed from New York for a summer jaunt in Europe, and every outgoing steamer is crowded with these too often ignorant and snobo- cratic Americans, who go to foreign lands knowing nothing of their own. How many of the thousands, who will sail for trans oceanic regions this sea- son, have ever seen anything of the glories and beauties and sublimities of their own majestic continent? How many of these stylish squanderers of time and money in doing European cigar shops and coffee houses c.l the guide book plan are aware that we have incomparably thegrander half of the world? How many of them real ize that all the cataracts of the old world poured into one would be triv- ial beside Niagara; that all the rivers of Europe are muddy and insignificant creeks compared with our mighty Mississippis, Missouris, Saskatchewans and Amazons; that all the lakes of oriental lands are puny duck-puddles compared with our own vast sap- phirean inland oceans; that all the geysers of Iceland and Zealand dwin- de to baby squirt-guns beside the tremendous fire-engines of the gods that play in perpetual and awful splendor amid the wild fastnesses of the Yellowstone; and that all the scenery of the Alps and the Appenines condensed would be a ten-cent side show to the Yellowsto Park
 have long urged a constitutional amendment prohibiting any untutored American citizen, redolent of pork corners, wheat gouges and stock swim dles, from going abroad to air his gilded ignorance and vulgarity until he has seen his own land. It should re- quire, as prerequisite for permission to visit London fogs and chop houses, Parisian milliners' and tailors' shops, and Italian skies, beggars and fieas, macaroni- hasheries and hand-organ- and-monkey factories, duly signed, stamped and scaled certificate from the president or general passenger agent of some great western or north western railway like the Northern Pacific or the Chicago & Northwest ern, that the would be foreign voy- ager had visited all the glorious and beautiful scenes along his line. This would be a grand educational meas ure. It would give thousands of sham Americans, native-born aliens and brevet foreigners, some idea of the